-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Exhorting the government to take necessary steps to formulate statistics pertaining to construction workers, domestic workers and women workers in the unorganised sector, the Central Information Commission has recommended the ministry of labour and employment carry out the exercise in line with provisions meant to promote “transparency, accountability and conformity” in the RTI Act. Then Information Commissioner, M Sridhar Acharyulu (who retired on November 21), in...

-TheCitizen.in81.3% of the female workforce in India out of the pale of the urban movementWhen Sumitra Devi, a resident of a remote village in Uttarakhand, has to collect fodder and firewood from the nearby forest, she is forced to travel in a group. The group provides her safety from wild animals, and more importantly, men. Going alone in the forest is a surefire recipe for inviting unwanted attention from men,...

-Networkideas.org In recent times, the clamour for formalising economic activity, or shrinking its unorganised component and expanding the organised, has been heard from diverse sources. There are those who want formalisation to occur because the unorganised sector is seen as being largely outside the direct and indirect tax net, depriving the government of much needed resources. Hence, for example, one feature seen as favouring the Goods and Services Tax regime is...

-TheWire.in Activists have argued that the purchasing power of the Rs 200 per month pension initiated in 2007 has already come down to Rs 93. New Delhi: On Sunday, about 10,000 elderly people from across the country came together at a Pension Parishad protest organised at Jantar Mantar in the capital demand universal pension rights for the elderly, single women, persons with disabilities, and other poor and vulnerable workers of the unorganised...

-The Indian Express The government is looking at various data sources and has started releasing enrolment data for Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) as an indicator. As per latest data, 41.26 lakh enrollments were recorded in the EPFO database for Sept 2017-April 2018. The government is planning to launch enterprise-level area frame survey early next month for capturing employment generation in companies with less than ten workers. The results of the survey,...